Can one have too many tube components in a system?

@wturkey LOL. That's what it seems like. A few years ago I had a Nuforce STA200 class a/b amp with a solid state pre and my Zu speakers. Sounded wonderful. I purchased a new Rogue RP-5 and the hiss was unbearable. I changed tubes, etcc..same thing.  Come to find out, the Nuforce had 34.5 db of gain where most amps are around 26 db. Until I purchased my Firstwatt J2, I had to use a passive pre between the pre and amp to keep the hiss at normal range. The Rogue ended up having some issues and after going thru the pain of shipping it back for warranty repair, I traded it in on a new BHK pre. and got the Firstwatt. Quiet as a mouse now

All of my components are tubed. So far no hiss heard through my Zus.

SS gear has a hiss noise floor too. A well designed & implemented tube preamp and tube power amp pairing should be dead quiet, even with ear up to drivers, on 96 dB speakers. I can’t speak to efficiencies beyond that. You’ll run into problems if you have a bad gain structure, for example tube line stages with gains 20dB and more can be a problem for efficient speakers, especially when run through high sensitivity amps - this is just too much active gain after the volume control, which acts as a gate for maintaining maximum signal to noise ratio from your upstream gear. You also have to be careful with tube selection in a line stage - for example, the 6SN7 is popular, but the sweet sounding 1940’s variants often tend to have issues with noise and microphonics, which will hurt your noise floor. Later 1950s/60s GTA and GTB versions tend to be a lot quieter. And of course, modern production tubes can be selected to be very quiet.

Tube phono stages shine when you pair a good tube MM stage with a SUT or a JFET MC stage. It’s hard to eliminate all audible hiss, but it should be way below the level of groove noise. Here, the efficiency of your speakers does not matter, because your phono stage’s signal to noise ratio is preserved by the downstream volume control.

When I hook up VAC power amp (16 tubes), Master preamp (2 tubes), Renaissance SE Phono & SUT (6 tubes), it’s an exceptionally quiet noise floor on my 96dB Tannoys.